[R-sig-teaching] Statistics are SO boring...

[Ed Merkle]

Christophe,

You may already know it, but Gelman has a book on teaching statistics 
that contains many good examples.  One that comes to mind (I think I 
found it there, at least) involves conditional probabilities involving 
being drunk and having a car accident at night.  The upshot is that 
P(accident at night | drunk) is low, but P(drunk | accident at night) is 
high (above .5, if I recall).

There is also a contingency table example from the tv show Mythbusters, 
where they study whether yawning is contagious.  They do not use 
statistics in the tv show and end up drawing the wrong conclusion.  See, 
for example,

http://www.statisticool.com/mythbusters.htm


Ed

-- 
Ed Merkle, PhD
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Psychology
Wichita State University
Wichita, KS 67260


> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 20:09:22 +0200
> From: Christophe Genolini <cgenolin at u-paris10.fr>
> To: r-sig-teaching at r-project.org
> Subject: [R-sig-teaching] Statistics are SO boring...
> Message-ID: <4C224DD2.60507 at u-paris10.fr>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> 
> Hi the list,
> 
> As a statistics teacher, I teach to NOT-scientists student, public that
> it is permanently necessary to motivate. I am thus in search of examples
> both scientific and playful to illustrate my courses. It is not always
> easy to find. As other teacher might be in the same case, I say to
> myself that we could maybe share our 'best' examples?
> 
> So I start: a social psychologist (Nicolas Gueguen, article here
> http://nicolas.gueguen.free.fr/index.html) has establishes that if we
> approach a perfect unknown lady on a beach and we ask for its phone
> number, we have 9 % of chance to obtain it. If we call her by touching
> her slightly on the front arm, we have 19 % (!!!) of chances to obtain
> it (test of chi2, p < 0.01). Surprising, isn't it?
> 
> So what are your 'best examples' ?
> 
> Christophe Genolini
> 
> --
> -----------------------------------------
> Christophe Genolini
> Maitre de conf?rences
> INSERM U669, Equipe Biostatistiques
> UFR STAPS, Universit? de Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La D?fense
> Web: http:\\christophe.genolini.free.fr
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------